This session will demonstrate the new features of Silverlight 2.0 in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and in Expression Blend 2.0 SP1. We will use the two products to create Silverlight applications that demonstrate the use of events, storyboards, datagrid manipulations and web service calls from Silverlight 2.0 C# based applications.

AJAX usually causes many misunderstandings for developers regarding when to use it and when NOT to. It is not true that using AJAX in web applications would always render sites faster, as a matter of fact AJAX can render applications way slower if not used correctly. This session will demonstrate how AJAX works internally and we will debug several instances using the FIDDLER 2 tool and explain the Page Life Cycle in ASP.NET applications that can render AJAX non usable in some cases. Finally we will discuss and demonstrate Web Services calls in AJAX applications that remedies the problems introduced by AJAX in ASP.NET applications.